Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Saturday, September 1, 2018

ACE TRACKS: August 2018

This past month, I finally had the opportunity to put something to test I've long wanted to: the practicality of my ACE TRACKS: Ultimate Master List!! playlist as a road trip experience. For the first time in my dozen years of going, I was gonna' drive myself to the Shambhala Music Festival, which meant sole control over the music selection! Right, that one bus sojourn could technically count too, and my many trips with Ishkur as the driver left me mostly in charge of music selection along the way (it helps that we both take perverse glee in torturing other passengers with italo disco sets), but this was a solo road trip for yours truly. As I've long claimed my Ultimate Master List!! should make for a useful aid in ultra-long road trips (9-10 hours, one-way), this was my chance to see if my hype lived up to provable facts.

I, uh, forgot to take one thing into consideration: the lack of cell coverage throughout most of British Columbia's mountain highways. By the time I'd gotten out of the Fraser Valley, all streaming came to an abrupt end, the only signal still attainable within the sporadic towns that dot the Crow's Nest Highway. I fortunately also packed with me an ample supply of CDs (just in case), but man, was I ever looking forward to hearing all those tunes on the road, even the dark ambient ones (nothing sets the mood of a province on fire better than dreary, ominous tones). Maybe next time I'll just download a couple of the monthly playlists instead, like this one for this past month of August 2018.

Whenever I make one of these shortened playlists, they tend to turn out a rather jumbled listening experience. The lack of selection causes frequent genre clashes, especially so when I just go with an alphabetical arrangement. I was expecting the same with this month's playlist, what with music from quite the disparate range of music (UK garage, techno, house, punk, psy, synthwave, ambient). Yet somehow, this turned out a remarkably smooth play-through. Even the jumps into Green Day or Etnica weren't as jarring as I was expecting. Funny how that works out sometimes.